It was early Monday morning as Israeli soldiers stormed the Gaza-bound international aid convoy called the Freedom Flotilla in international waters about forty miles off the coast of Gaza. The six ships had nearly 700 international activists on board and 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid. They were aiming to break the three-year-long siege of the Gaza Strip. Israeli commandos landed on the lead ship in the convoy, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, which...

Israeli President Shimon Peres has denied reports he offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa when he was defense minister in the 1970s. On Sunday, the Guardian newspaper of London published top-secret South African documents revealing that a secret meeting between then-defense minister Shimon Peres and his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha, ended with an offer by Peres for the sale of warheads "in three sizes."...

On Sunday afternoon, Noam Chomsky was stopped by Israeli border guards at the Allenby Bridge border crossing from Jordan. After over three hours of questioning, Chomsky’s passport was stamped with "Denied Entry." He was scheduled to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah and was scheduled to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. No reason was initially given for the decision, but the Interior...

The student senate at the University of California, Berkeley, has failed to override a veto of a bill calling on campus officials to divest from companies that supply weapons that Israel uses in its occupation of the Palestinian territories. [includes rush transcript]

President Obama concluded an international summit on nuclear security in Washington, DC Tuesday after securing pledges from dozens of nations to eliminate or safeguard all vulnerable nuclear materials within four years. We speak with political science professor, John Mueller, author of Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, and John Steinbach, who has studied Israel’s nuclear weapons program. [includes rush...

As the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners are announced, we speak with the first African American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction: author, poet and activist Alice Walker. She was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple. She was written many books since then. Her latest, just out, is called Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel. [includes rush transcript]...

We speak with two journalists who have covered Gaza extensively about the dangers and difficulties of reporting from the Occupied Territories: Mohammed Omer, an award-winning Palestinian journalist who was interrogated and beaten by armed Israeli security guards on his way back home to Gaza after receiving the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in London in July of 2008, and Ayman Mohyeldin, the Gaza correspondent for Al Jazeera...

Norman Finkelstein is author of several books on the Israel Palestine conflict. His latest is This Time We Went Too Far: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. In Part II of our conversation, Finkelstein discusses lessons he learned from Gandhi, the role of public opinion in politics, and more.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told attendees at the AIPAC conference on Monday that the US commitment to Israel is "rock-solid," but Clinton did criticize Israel for continuing to build settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. In a defiant speech hours after Clinton’s address, Netanyahu rejected US criticism and vowed to continue building settlements. We speak with Norman Finkelstein, author of the new book, This Time We...